"A great film by Paul Schrader, best known for having penned a bunch of legendary screenplays for Martin Scorsese. The film revolves around Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, and jumps between the story of his life and dreamlike depictions of scenes from his books. It’s got a particularly good score by Philip Glass, who I usually find to be tedious, but this one is nice. Schrader’s use of color and set design during the book segments of the film are quite theatrical and feel closely related to Robert Wilson’s on Einstein on the Beach—although I don’t have any evidence to back that connection up. Great flick, though."

"Cronenberg is a good example of a director who has often made my favorite kind of film: a genre movie that feels profound. I haven’t seen The Brood in a long time, but I remember how it excited me. He wrote it too, as he will, and it’s low budget, which is a virtue, and it’s a horror movie that ingeniously presents the idea of extreme human emotion becoming personified, in a strong metaphor for how life can feel. Maybe that’s already a spoiler. I’ll stop, except to say that perhaps an even greater instance of a profound genre flick from Cronenberg is The Fly."

"I don’t want to say much about La strada other than that it’s the reason why I am here. When you watch this movie, no matter who you are, you get the sense that this is something special that couldn’t have been made for television or heard as a radio play. It’s not Alain Resnais, it’s very accessible, and yet it has cinematic purity. This is a mark of how depressing the movie business has gotten—we don’t make these kinds of movies anymore, movies where there’s just a natural consensus that they’re good. Where you don’t have to wait for critics to say so, because everybody can feel it."